WordPress + Facebook + Twitter = Social

Trying to integrate WordPress blogs with Facebook and Twitter has been a bit of a nusiance. Creating Applications and OAuth issues just have bogged down many attempts to make this endeavor successful. Most bloggers now share and tweet about their posts and thus receive comments on each site. The people at Crowd Favorite and MailChimp have created a plugin for WordPress called Social.

Social is a lightweight plugin for WordPress that handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. Through the use of a proxy application, you can associate your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog and its users. Once you publish a new post, you can then choose to automatically broadcast a message to any accounts authenticated with the overall blog or your current logged-in user.

Through Social, you can aggregate the various mentions, retweets, @replies, comments and responses and republish them as WordPress comments. Social polls Twitter and Facebook periodically for new comments about your posts, and adds them as comments when it finds a URL reference.

CreativeCG has the plugin running and it’s been quite successful so far. Recent version release of 1.0.1 has introduced some fixes to allow the aggregation cron job to run on more server setups. For more technical details on the plugin head over to the website of Alex King of Crowd Favorite, the development mastermind behind Social, and check out his blog post on the plugin.